Various embodiments described herein relate to computer systems, methods and program products and, more particularly, to virtualized computer systems, methods and computer program products.
A Virtual Machine (VM) is a software implementation of an underlying machine (i.e., a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine. A virtual machine can provide a complete system platform which supports the execution of a complete operating system. The virtual machine may emulate an existing architecture, and may provide a platform to run programs where the real hardware is not available for use and/or may provide multiple instances of virtual machines to allow more efficient use of computing resources. Virtualization is often used in a cloud computing environment, where the physical hardware configuration is hidden from the end user.
A hypervisor, or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) is computer software, firmware and/or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. The underlying hardware or virtual infrastructure on which the hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines may be referred to as a “hardware platform”. Each virtual machine is referred to as a “guest machine”. A host machine may also be provided. The hypervisor presents the host machine and guest machine operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the host and guest machine operating systems. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources.